In recent years, cosmetic products have come to range more widely than ever before both in terms of kinds and modes of use. Cosmetic products are now being sold in larger scales than ever before at supermarkets and convenience stores in addition to more conventional sales places where face to face selling is being conducted, and a wide range of cosmetic products are now available to the consumers in larger volumes. The consumer normally obtains information on the cosmetic products and the associated make-up techniques on such products from the documentations attached to the products, magazines and the Internet to make use of such information when applying the cosmetic product on her (or him). However, it is not possible to accurately predict if the result of applying the particular cosmetic product on the user is going to be satisfactory or not merely from such information.
To overcome such a problem of the prior art, Patent Document 1 discloses a method that includes the steps of identifying a cosmetic procedure from a sample image depicting a face which the user desires, applying the identified cosmetic procedure to the face image of the user to generate a reference make-up face image, evaluating a correlation between the face image of the user and the reference make-up face image at each step of the make-up procedure, and providing cosmetic advice based on the result of the evaluating step.
Patent Document 2 discloses an arrangement for extracting two independent feature values (indices regarding how centrifugal or centripetal certain facial parts such as eyes and a nose are, and how linear or curved the shape of each face part is), and classifying the face in terms of the features or impressions thereof depending on which of the four quadrants of a two dimensional evaluation coordinate plane the feature values are plotted in.